47 pages • 1 hour read
An Unquiet Mind
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Part 3, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “This Medicine, Love”
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “An Officer and a Gentleman”
“This Medicine, Love” deals primarily with Jamison’s love life and relationships, including the way she had to navigate her illness. “An Officer and a Gentleman” is about Jamison’s relationship with David, an English psychiatrist and military officer. The pair met in 1975, when David joined UCLA as a visiting professor on leave from the Royal Army Medical Corps. They “liked one another immediately” and began working and lunching together (141). As she had recently moved back in with her husband, in an effort to work out their marriage, Jamison declined his advances. However, they remained in touch even after David returned to England, and after she and her husband officially and finally separated, David returned to surprise her with a visit.
After spending time together in Los Angeles, David invited her to London. While there, visiting Canterbury on her own, Jamison accidentally spills her lithium onto the floor. Knowing that she cannot go without her medicine, she realizes that she will need to tell David about her condition and ask him to write her a new script. Despite her fears and his initial silence, David simply responds that her illness is rotten luck for her; this is not only a relief, but a realization that it is, in fact, rotten luck, not an indictment of her character. David immediately sets about to understand her illness and become an ally for her, including one evening inviting two English military officers who were also manic-depressive for dinner, which helps to normalize the condition for Jamison.
Jamison returned to Los Angeles “with a terrible sense of apprehension” (147). She recalls one incident where David appeared quite short of breath, which she wrote off to exhaustion. However, shortly after being transferred to Hong Kong on assignment, she receives word that David has passed away from a heart attack while on duty in Kathmandu. Jamison begins this chapter by quoting Robert Lowell: “If we see a light at the end of the tunnel, he said, it’s the light of an oncoming train” (139). For Jamison, the death of David, whom she had loved, was the oncoming train. She travels to London for the funeral, where his family and fellow officers help to alleviate her pain through clinical language and friendship; however, she uses the opportunity to ruminate on the difference between grief and depression, as grief “is sad, it is awful, but it is not without hope” (150). “Time finally did bring relief,” she writes, citing Edna St. Vincent Millay, “But it took its own, and not terribly sweet, time in doing so” (152).
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “They Tell Me It Rained”
Jamison is now taking lithium regularly, having “finally cottoned onto the disastrous consequences of starting and stopping lithium” (153). Realizing she had never taken sabbatical, she decides to take a year’s sabbatical in England; ostensibly, she is going to study mood disorders in British artists, but the true purpose of her sabbatical is to rest and regroup. She spends time split between St. George’s Hospital Medical School and the University of Oxford, which, due to socioeconomic differences, among other things, “could not have been more different experiences” (154). Jamison spends most of her time in London, but travels to Oxford several times per week, enjoying the peace and quiet of her suite of rooms there, in addition to the excellent food and lively conversation of the eminently-accomplished fellow researchers and professors. Through her time spent there and absorbed in London cultural life, she feels a renewed vitality: “It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life” (157).
One day, she visits David’s grave and becomes wrapped up in thoughts about him. She realizes that she “had been thinking, for the first time, about how much David had missed, rather than what [they] together would miss,” considering the ramifications of dying young (159). Though she still misses David immensely, she has also begun a new affair with “an elegant, moody, and totally charming Englishman” (159). The relationship, they both knew, would only last as long as she was in England, and although it has an expiration date, it nevertheless helped to rejuvenate her. She is open and passionate with him in a way that she had not been since David’s passing; in conversation, he convinces her that while in England would be a good time to experiment with taking lower doses of lithium. After further discussing it with her psychiatrists in Los Angeles and London, she reduces her dosage and discovers that she is immediately more energetic and more focused than she had been previously, and “once again” able to “read without effort” (162).
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Love Watching Madness”
Jamison dreads leaving England, as her “moods had held at a more even keel for longer than [she] could remember; [her] heart was newly alive; and [her] mind was in a glorious state, having loped, grazed, and mulled its less medicated self through” her time there (163). Further, she has realized that she has “come to associate [Los Angeles] not only with a grueling academic career, but also with breakdowns, the worn, cold, bloodlessness following in their wake, and the draining charade of pretending to be well” (164). However, the restorative nature of her time in England has actually alleviated those issues, and she discovers that she once again enjoys her life in Los Angeles, making her realize the heavy cost mental illness has truly caused her.
One of her primary focuses is the writing of a textbook on manic-depressive illness. Although she finds herself sometimes working in her own experiences, she also finds that “Having to stand back from [her] own feelings and past in order to write in a more cerebral, scholarly way was refreshing” (166).
She also finds that lowering her medication dosage has actually made her more capable of handling stress, “like the building codes in California that are designed to prevent damage from earthquakes” by incorporating a bit of give into the approach, allowing her “mind and emotions to sway a bit” (167). However, she also finds that she is unfamiliar with a predictable world filled with relatively stable moods, and finds it “sobering” to understand how little she understands about living in that kind of world (168-69).
She realizes that she had, until then, believed that she could only be with a similarly moody, passionate person, or else the relationship wouldn’t work. This is undermined when she meets the well-known schizophrenia researcher Richard Wyatt, for whom she eventually leaves Los Angeles, and whom she eventually marries. They are very different people, he being “a man of moderation […] Yet not once in the years [they] have been together [has she] doubted Richard’s love for [her], nor [hers] for him” (172-73): “My life with Richard has become a safe harbor: an extremely interesting place, filled with love and warmth and always a bit open to the outer sea” (173). However, she remarks that this love takes work, and argues that:
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication […] Madness […] most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods (174).
However, Jamison also notes that “if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine” (175).
Part 3 Analysis
The dominant theme of this section is love, and Jamison approaches this in several ways: first, to explore the meaning love has for her; second, to explore what her illness means for relationships; and third, to illustrate what this has looked like from a practical perspective in her own life. Jamison’s first marriage was both a product and victim of her illness; the relationship began abruptly and progressed quickly in part due to her mania, and she writes in this section that, despite trying to make it work after going on lithium regularly, the marriage was likely irreconcilable from the moment her psychotic episodes began. However, it is important to note that Jamison never suggests that she did not truly love her first husband or that he did not truly love her; rather, her relationship with him serves to illustrate just how difficult and destructive manic-depressive illness can be, particularly when left untreated, and when one partner is not aware of or prepared for the illness. (We might also turn to her parents’ divorce, as the strong suggestion is, again, that her father suffered from untreated manic-depressive illness.)
The section is roughly divided into three different relationships and periods of her life, ultimately providing three different perspectives on love and mental illness. The first chapter, “An Officer and a Gentleman,” describes her relationship with David Laurie. The relationship is a loving, passionate one, and we are given to understand that, had it not been for David’s passing, their intention was to marry and have children. Her relationship with David serves as an important illustration of what it means to be an ally to someone with mental illness (though by no means is it meant to be the only approach, as we will see), as we see David’s attempts to understand and normalize the illness, rather than criticize Jamison for it. In doing so, David creates a kind of stability, safety, and acceptance that had previously been missing from Jamison’s love life. The eventual, tragic outcome also disabuses her of a previously held idea that her illness meant that other parts of her life should come more easily in order to make up for it; it would be easy to write this off, but it is an epiphany that demonstrates growth and maturity of perspective.
The second relationship, with an unnamed Englishman four years later while on sabbatical, is another passionate relationship with someone given to moods and impulse in much the same way as her. Though the relationship is described entirely in positive terms, it is also one that has an expiration date, suggesting the importance of being able to live in the moment, at least to some extent, and accept the limits of even good things in life. It is also impactful in the sense that he helped Jamison come to the decision to lower her dosage, which has had a profound impact on her life since.
However, there is another relationship in this section, which is her relationship with the United Kingdom. The UK has played an important role in her life, from her early year at St. Andrews to her multiple sabbaticals in England as an adult; it is perhaps also significant, although coincidental, that two of her four most important relationships were with Englishmen. London, particularly, appears to have a calming, restorative effect on Jamison, and it is after her first sabbatical that her love of teaching and research is restored. This may be in part due to the change in her lithium dosages, but she also credits the nature of her time away, which allowed her to slow down, reconnect with culture, and enjoy the company of others. It is interesting—though glossed over—that she takes a second, shorter sabbatical shortly before making the much larger move from Los Angeles.
The final chapter of the section, “Love Watching Madness,” serves as a counterpoint of sorts. It is in part a rumination on the restorative effect England had on her ability to throw herself into her work, as well as a meditation on her newfound relationship with the world following her lower dosages. But, it is also a description of a different kind of relationship, one dependent less on passion than on work. Her relationship with Richard Wyatt is in some ways similar to her relationship with David Laurie. Wyatt and Laurie both respond to her admission of manic-depressive illness with a series of clinical questions, for example, but at the same time, where Laurie tended to feed her passions, Wyatt often resists them. This is, again, not suggested negatively: Jamison writes that Wyatt forces her to reckon with her own moods as much as lithium helps to control them. However, it is different, part of a spectrum of approaches and styles.
(Note: Richard Wyatt has passed away in the time since An Unquiet Mind was published, and in 2010, Jamison remarried the Johns Hopkins cardiologist Thomas Traill, to whom she is still married.)
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